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Walking into the Slack offices in downtown San Francisco feels like walking into a Slack channel online.

Brightly colored sofas in the shape of hashtags fill the shared spaces, surrounded by a comfortable margin of airy whitespace. As company rep Katie Wattie leads me around, I realize that every conference room is named after an emoji. There are emojis everywhere I look. Clocks have emoji instead of numbers. New employees have foil balloons floating over their desks with the :heart eyes: emoji emblazoned on them.

Slack CTO Cal Henderson is waiting for us in the ⛵ room. I've been so inundated with emoji that I have to ask: "Do you guys have a poop emoji room?" Henderson doesn't bat an eye. "Not even the bathrooms have that on them, which is surprising," he muses in a British accent that has been slightly eroded after many years in the States. With his slightly mussed brown hair and casual shirt, Henderson looks the part of a Silicon Valley executive.

And if Slack succeeds, Henderson's company will soon export this same casual, information-rich culture of Silicon Valley tech companies to the world.

The lure of Slack is simple. It promises to make work teams more productive by eliminating meetings and e-mail. The platform integrates an easy-to-use chat system with tools for committing code, making payments, monitoring backups, and more. Plus Slack is fun, which is not a word usually applied to enterprise software. Maybe that's because Slack is aimed at consumers. In fact, many people sign up for free Slack accounts just to chat with friends.

Slack may not currently have the reach of Outlook, but that could change. With over 2.3 million daily users, a a rumored $3.6 billion valuation, and hundreds of apps in its growing ecosystem of custom-built tools, world domination isn't implausible. The app's appeal isn't just about functionality. It's about the needs of a new generation of people who work in virtual teams.

Companies have been experimenting for over a decade with social enterprise software, not to mention standard office communications packages like Outlook. Slack is different. It's not designed to supplement your office software; it's designed to replace it. Even more radically, Slack aims to replace the office itself, creating a platform for people who work entirely online. The question is, what will happen to office culture when everything we do and say at work is converted into a string of emoji-laced texts—especially when those texts are logged and searchable forever?

Spawn of IRC

Working in Slack feels like working at Slack for one simple reason. Henderson and his team built the software for themselves when they were developing the game Glitch with Tiny Speck, a company whose staff was split between San Francisco and Vancouver. "We started with IRC because we needed to chat somehow," Henderson recalls. "We tried things for collaboration, like having a constant video link or open Skype calls all day. But the thing that was consistent was IRC."

Further Reading

IRC, or internet relay chat, is a 28-year-old protocol for text-based communication that's open and incredibly versatile. Henderson and his colleagues built their entire workflow on top of it. They shared game assets, migrated a game server with it, committed code—and, of course, maintained contact with the whole team. When they ceased work on Glitch in 2012, Henderson says, they agreed that they would never work together again without a customized IRC system like what they had at Tiny Speck.

That's when they had the moment of realization. They already had a set of valuable toolsets that lived on top of IRC. Maybe it could be an actual product. The trouble with IRC has always been that it works like a dream for people with technical expertise, but it's a pain in the ass for non-technical users. If they could give less enterprising teams the experience they'd had with Glitch over IRC, they might have a winning app on their hands.

So Henderson and his team plunged into building Slack without doing any user research, other than on themselves. "We found it useful and thought surely others would," Henderson says. Their only direct competitors at the time were Hipchat and Campfire, and the latter is now defunct. With no experience building enterprise software, they used their backgrounds in consumer software to guide them.

This turned out to be the right move. Not many companies use apps for collaboration, but most people have considerable experience with social media no matter where they work. On a daily basis, people today communicate in real time using SMS, Facebook messenger, Whatsapp, Wechat, and more. "People in social settings were used to having many different apps to talk to people," Henderson explains. "But it hadn't yet come to business."

Social media goes to work

Tech companies have been experimenting with bringing social media into the workplace for years. In 2007, IBM launched a company-wide social network called Beehive, which allowed employees to create and share personal profiles, organize events, and connect with other people who share their interests. Thousands of employees joined, using it to find collaborators they never could have met otherwise.

That same year, HP launched an "enterprise social media" system called WaterCooler. Like Beehive, WaterCooler used a combination of profiles and microblogging, mostly to help people find each other when they were working on similar projects.

Other experiments with social media have been happening informally in offices all over the world. Employees at the MITRE Corporation, an organization that employs over 7,500 people to conduct work for US government agencies, created an internal wiki called MITREpedia in 2005. NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab has a similar internal wiki called JPL Wired, created in 2010. Both organizations found that there was no need to introduce specialized software like WaterCooler—their employees spontaneously started building wikis to document important discoveries and share scientific information.

What's different now is that social media apps aren't just supplemental tools to help people in large organizations find each other or keep track of big projects. They are replacing offices entirely. For people who work in virtual teams, apps like Slack are the workplace.

This is an unprecedented situation, and management experts are struggling to understand it. Information studies researcher Casey Pierce says most research has explored what happens when a workplace transitions to using apps for communication, creating a "mixed" environment of in-person meetings, e-mail, and other apps. But Slack promises get rid of all that, instead offering one software platform to rule them all.

"When there's no other workplace technology that's in competition with using social media, we'd expect different communication norms," Pierce mused. "How do we think about organizational culture when colleagues have never met face-to-face? What are the starting points for norms and expectations? We're going to see vastly different ways of coordinating."

184 Reader Comments

For IRC / Linux, you retain ownership and it's more powerful, lightweight, and easier to tinker around in;For Slack / Mac, you "use the clouuuud", and its easier to use and is "prettier", and isn't as open.

We use HipChat at work because Slack was a magnitude of order more expensive, and it's universally hated. The non-tech folks hate its reliance on the cloud and its god-awful native clients, and the tech folks hate its reliance on the cloud and lack of flexibility. We still use IRC for community channels.

> Other Ars staffers, like policy editor Joe Mullin, find that Slack has helped them get a lot more serious about work. Joe never used IRC, partly because there was only one channel where people could talk to each other. Once we had Slack, David Kravets created a #policy channel where Mullin could meet with the other wonk-minded staffers to discuss patent trolls and PACER hacks.

This particularly caught my attention. What exactly prevented Joe from doing that on IRC? Creating a channel is as hard as joining one. What was he missing?

Also, I get that this is a Slack profile, but considering that it touches on how Slack has no competition, can we get some news on FOSS like Mattermost, or Vector.im/Matrix, or Zulip, or Let's Chat?

This will be my last comment on a Newitz article. But please, Ars. I've been a regular reader for 8 + years. I'm begging you.

+1 to this.

It's like we are listening to her talk informally about it, but this is not a verbal conversation, it is written. We don't speak like we write. Interesting topic, needs some serious editing cause it is hard to read as written.

I don't get the hate. This was a long article which could have been broken up into a series of smaller ones, but it was interesting to see first-hand impressions of the company, the roadmap for future investments (apps, always apps... and appstores, bah), but also some insights into Ars Technica office culture. I enjoyed reading this.

I'm a relative newcomer to Slack (not many academics use it). But on a project-by-project basis, it's great for tech-savvy collaborations to do with publishing and sharing research. For involved academic projects, email is often a productivity sink. So anything that can reduce the number of short, immediately answerable emails, or develop ideas in (near) real time, really helps. I wish some of the older researchers I have to collaborate with were more tech savvy. BTW I'm not in ComSci or any science department - but I could see how it would be useful for collaborating on papers, say.

The branding on these is really hard for and old fart like me to embrace. How can something called slack or yammer be taken seriously? Where is its place? I have the same problem as MS transitioned from Technet to the blogging system as gospel for products. How can a infrequent or casual reader effectively determine if a blog is gospel or just the random ramblings of some dude?

I wish Slack would work with the company I'm at, but when you're doing government contract work, you positively can't have the communication leave the corporate network when discussing projects. This is doubly so when you are working on a closed network, and you have to log conversations with other people in the same company that are not governed by the same security requirements.

Also don't forget about Google Wave as a precursor to Slack. Wave was amazing; I just wish Google had continued with it instead of killing the entire project.

I found it interesting that the one FOIA request that was used as an example said the Emoji were removed. Why? I would consider the Emoji an integral part of the conversation, since they convey with a picture what you would otherwise use a pile of words on.

To go directly from the article's example, the use of a "balls" emoji in a workplace could be considered inappropriate. If someone decided to sue for sexual harassment, and said "they were throwing around these sexually explicit emoji like no one's business," a records search would show no emoji.

To put it another way, it's like going somewhere on vacation, taking a bunch of pictures of the scenery, and a few years later you want to go show a friend your awesome photos, but Facebook has only kept the comments. For a company that puts such heavy emphasis on Emoji, not keeping them as records (or at least not reproducing them for a records search) is bizarre.

Also, I can't see this ever replacing Lync/SkypeFB for my utility. We use the entire Office suite, and the deep integration between the various bits is essential for us. Replacing SkypeFB with this would be a non-starter. And yeah, that price. $7/person/month is just eye-wateringly expensive when you can get an Office365 business and it includes outlook and skypeFB.

Holy hell what a wall of words without any content. No, this is not a simple troll, I'm completely serious. This entire article could be summed up in a paragraph or two. More words does not equal quality. Even after all of that I don't understand why Slack is superior to IRC.

I could not disagree more. I thought this article was a brilliant exploration of where office culture and social dynamics are headed, and the implications that has on our social relationships with our fellow coworkers.

If you were reading this article in the expectations of finding a comparison between the bullet points of two tech products, you were reading the wrong article. This article was emphatically NOT a review of Slack. The hint is in Newitz' author bio, "Annalee Newitz is the Tech Culture Editor at Ars Technica" (emphasis mine).

Maybe the value of Slack depends on your work. I like e-mail because I can ignore it for a while to concentrate on tasks. Instant messaging has no place in my work-world.

On the other hand, we do have a lot of meetings and teleconferences so there are times a messaging system might be handier than Lync, Polycom, or whatever you use. Those tend to only allow one-to-all speakers (and only one transmitted screen display) and few, if any, text side-channels.

As far as records go, Outlook e-mail does save my @ss by being able to search for and re-send stuff written years ago. They only downside I've seen is, if you have enough e-mails to need to archive, archives are not always well-indexed unless you leave them 'open' for hours. That would be simple enough for MS to fix by always indexing archives when-created.

Gah. Can someone please get Newitz an editor? I mean, grammar is a thing. I really want to finish reading this article- the subject matter is interesting/relevant and Newitz seems to have had first-hand access to their offices. But it just takes too much concentration to sift through her many misaligned phrases and misused conjunctions. It's not worth the mental effort.

This will be my last comment on a Newitz article. But please, Ars. I've been a regular reader for 8 + years. I'm begging you.

+1 to this.

It's like we are listening to her talk informally about it, but this is not a verbal conversation, it is written. We don't speak like we write. Interesting topic, needs some serious editing cause it is hard to read as written.

For what it's worth, I'm the office's anal-retentive speller/grammar-corrector, and I found the article a breeze to read. Maybe caffeine hasn't kicked in, or maybe I'm just used to that type of writing. Who knows. Either way, it wasn't a problem for me.

I'm actually kind of interested what particular problems you two have with the article. If for no other reason to improve my own writing.

edited to add - and there is no way in hell slack could "replace" email, even internally. Email at ars is the official way of communicating anything of importance, since it leaves a record. Slack is for ephemeral blahblah stuff. Slack can certainly cut down on the need to use email for every bit of talking, but it's insane to think of it as an email replacement.

I don't understand how this is any better than IRC (which supports private messages, too): IRC has plenty of no-fuss clients that the technically illiterate can use just fine - even webchat if necessary.

History that travels with you, instead of being locked to the client you originated it on, notifications, znc-like behavior built-in from the start, (chat from any device anywhere as you not as a 2nd copy of you, with backlog and everything)

I work at a large company where Slack has been rolled out. Some people just LOOOOVE it, but I find the fragmentation and lack of organization quite frustrating. It's great if you can do everything in the here and now, but OMG if you need to go back a couple of weeks to look at something, well, God bless you.

Holy hell what a wall of words without any content. No, this is not a simple troll, I'm completely serious. This entire article could be summed up in a paragraph or two. More words does not equal quality. Even after all of that I don't understand why Slack is superior to IRC. I'm not saying that it isn't, but I don't see why other than emojis? The argument that IRC is more difficult to use is ... silly. Both need a client. Both need to know where you're connecting. Both need to know what "channel" you want to connect to. The only difference I can see is it's new and shiny. Of course it's going to get used more, people like new and shiny. That's not a technical issue, it's a product of our short term attention span society. It's going to be something else in two years because that's how we now are. That's what this article should have focused on. Hey here's something that's been around for many years but throw some poop images in it and it's brand new and awesome!

As someone who has never seen Slack, it was super helpful to get a grip on what the program is and its basics. In fact, I would have mistaken the screenshot for a screenshot of Discord had I not known...

> Other Ars staffers, like policy editor Joe Mullin, find that Slack has helped them get a lot more serious about work. Joe never used IRC, partly because there was only one channel where people could talk to each other. Once we had Slack, David Kravets created a #policy channel where Mullin could meet with the other wonk-minded staffers to discuss patent trolls and PACER hacks.

This particularly caught my attention. What exactly prevented Joe from doing that on IRC? Creating a channel is as hard as joining one. What was he missing?

Discord is essentially a gaming-focused Slack clone, but I completely understand why Slack is so nice. Having things just work, and the ease and features on top of IRC are really convenient. IRC always felt clunky, and I never ran into a client that made things easier.

Slack has helped at Ars, I think, since the barrier to entry is a lot lower than with IRC for folks without a deep tech background (not to pick on Joe, but yeah, it was hard supporting some of the ars staffers with IRC). The end result is more collaboration, and that's mostly a good thing since we're all distributed and we all work from home.

But honestly, slack is a lot less flexible than IRC and I don't like it as much. Their bot integration is weak sauce and not as powerful as IRC bots (in fact, the vast majority of our bot functionality is still done with an IRC bot that hooks into slack via its IRC gateway). Slack really is just IRC + instant messaging + cloud storage for files, all rolled into one app—with the added bonus of taking control of your messaging out of your hands and putting it into the hands of a 3rd party company that might or might not be compelled by LEOs or other entities to release your data without telling you.

And the whole "we keep all of your logs but you have to be on a paid plan to see them" sucks. I mean, I get it—it's a great revenue hook!—but even at $7 a head per month for the cheapest paid plan, we'd be in the hole for thousands of dollars per year if we were subscribing. And that's, shit, I don't know, 20x the cost of maintaining our own IRC server at our colo, even with admin overhead factored in. The value prop is super SUPER weak.

So I guess I am a reluctant slacker. It's good we're using it, because it's lowered communication friction and gotten more authors participating in the daily news flow, but IMO it's just flat-out inferior to IRC and XMPP IM.

edited to add - and there is no way in hell slack could "replace" email, even internally. Email at ars is the official way of communicating anything of importance, since it leaves a record. Slack is for ephemeral blahblah stuff. Slack can certainly cut down on the need to use email for every bit of talking, but it's insane to think of it as an email replacement.

Have you, at ars, ever looked into using IRCCloud or Quassel for your less technically experienced people on IRC?

Slack has helped at Ars, I think, since the barrier to entry is a lot lower than with IRC for folks without a deep tech background (not to pick on Joe, but yeah, it was hard supporting some of the ars staffers with IRC). The end result is more collaboration, and that's mostly a good thing since we're all distributed and we all work from home.

But honestly, slack is a lot less flexible than IRC and I don't like it as much. Their bot integration is weak sauce and not as powerful as IRC bots (in fact, the vast majority of our bot functionality is still done with an IRC bot that hooks into slack via its IRC gateway). Slack really is just IRC + instant messaging + cloud storage for files, all rolled into one app—with the added bonus of taking control of your messaging out of your hands and putting it into the hands of a 3rd party company that might or might not be compelled by LEOs or other entities to release your data without telling you.

And the whole "we keep all of your logs but you have to be on a paid plan to see them" sucks. I mean, I get it—it's a great revenue hook!—but even at $7 a head per month for the cheapest paid plan, we'd be in the hole for thousands of dollars per year if we were subscribing. And that's, shit, I don't know, 20x the cost of maintaining our own IRC server at our colo, even with admin overhead factored in. The value prop is super SUPER weak.

So I guess I am a reluctant slacker. It's good we're using it, because it's lowered communication friction and gotten more authors participating in the daily news flow, but IMO it's just flat-out inferior to IRC and XMPP IM.

edited to add - and there is no way in hell slack could "replace" email, even internally. Email at ars is the official way of communicating anything of importance, since it leaves a record. Slack is for ephemeral blahblah stuff. Slack can certainly cut down on the need to use email for every bit of talking, but it's insane to think of it as an email replacement.

Have you, at ars, ever looked into using IRCCloud or Quassel for your less technically experienced people on IRC?

We had a great webclient that Lee Aylward (aka Good Lee, or Bearded Lee) wrote. But what's done is done, we've moved to Slack, and even though I miss IRC it has its advantages. Not having to host an image before sharing it is one, and mobile support is a billion times better. We're not going back to IRC.

every conference room is named after an emoji. There are emojis everywhere I look. Clocks have emoji instead of numbers. New employees have foil balloons floating over their desks with the :heart eyes: emoji emblazoned on them.

Slack CTO Cal Henderson is waiting for us in the ⛵ room.

Quote:

...if Slack succeeds, Henderson's company will soon export this same casual, information-rich culture of Silicon Valley tech companies to the world.

I'll have mine sans emoji, please. There's a time and a place for everything.

I agree that I want mine sans emoji, but I can't agree that there is a time or place for them. Unless the goal is to confuse the conversation. Emoji are good at creating confusion.

We had a great webclient that Lee Aylward (aka Good Lee, or Bearded Lee) wrote. But what's done is done, we've moved to Slack, and even though I miss IRC it has its advantages. Not having to host an image before sharing it is one, and mobile support is a billion times better. We're not going back to IRC.

As an ardent user of IRCCloud, the mobile support is great - I'm not sure what you'd be missing from it? (IRCCloud actually has a built-in image upload feature.) They added themes, thank goodness, and ... yeah. I don't have to deal with five different clients, or ever missing a message [aside from when they get DDOS'd ...]. I don't really see how slack looks too much different - the one big difference from this writeup is that while IRCCloud stores all your backlog, you can't search it at all. But I have no idea where you're getting 'a billion times better' from, for mobile support specifically.

We had a great webclient that Lee Aylward (aka Good Lee, or Bearded Lee) wrote. But what's done is done, we've moved to Slack, and even though I miss IRC it has its advantages. Not having to host an image before sharing it is one, and mobile support is a billion times better. We're not going back to IRC.

The thing I like about Slack is you can get the best of both worlds - I use the Slack client on my phone for easy access/notifications, but I use mIRC for my day-to-day usage of it through their IRC gateway.

I did give Slack a go but it really seems like a one trick pony. Yeah, you can attach files, and it's good for basic conversations / realtime collab, but document versioning, linking, etc. and even scheduling was beyond its grasp (when I tried it anyway) which are things I think of when I think of collaboration suites.

I also think the type of work you're doing (and your personality / brain configuration) plays a big part in whether you'll see this kind of "all day conference" as a boon, or a distraction. Personally I find email to be distracting enough, and sometimes ignore it for stretches of time. 'Flow' , the 'Pomodoro technique' and various other concepts that emphasize lack of interruption / lack of multitasking work far better for me. Days where I reply to a lot of email are not typically days where I get a lot done. Days where I do not wear headphones in the open-office plan, likewise, are not super productive. For some kinds of work (coding in my case) and/or personality types, I think closing doors and a lack of chat rooms would be better. Then just schedule your meetings and collaboration sprints in advance. (Or knock if important)

I guess it's really just a tricky balance between flow and collaboration opportunity.

Gah. Can someone please get Newitz an editor? I mean, grammar is a thing. I really want to finish reading this article- the subject matter is interesting/relevant and Newitz seems to have had first-hand access to their offices. But it just takes too much concentration to sift through her many misaligned phrases and misused conjunctions. It's not worth the mental effort.

This will be my last comment on a Newitz article. But please, Ars. I've been a regular reader for 8 + years. I'm begging you.

+1 to this.

It's like we are listening to her talk informally about it, but this is not a verbal conversation, it is written. We don't speak like we write. Interesting topic, needs some serious editing cause it is hard to read as written.

But it *is* an informal description. Starting from that premise it was informative and easy to read. I didn't think that there might be a problem until I read this complaint.

It isn't a technical description or a formal "compare and contrast", but I wasn't looking for either of those.

Slack has helped at Ars, I think, since the barrier to entry is a lot lower than with IRC for folks without a deep tech background (not to pick on Joe, but yeah, it was hard supporting some of the ars staffers with IRC). The end result is more collaboration, and that's mostly a good thing since we're all distributed and we all work from home.

Wow, I did not expect that anyone who writes for ars would have a problem connecting to an IRC server.

I mean, I have non-techy aunts and uncles (in their 60s) who kept in touch worldwide using IRC (they've since migrated to Facebook, so I don't keep in touch with them anymore).

Gah. Can someone please get Newitz an editor? I mean, grammar is a thing. I really want to finish reading this article- the subject matter is interesting/relevant and Newitz seems to have had first-hand access to their offices. But it just takes too much concentration to sift through her many misaligned phrases and misused conjunctions.

I really REALLY dislike Slack, though I don't think it's the fault of the software particularly. It just comes down to lack of adoption and fragmentation, as others have pointed out. Adding Slack to the mix doesn't mean any of my coworkers have stopped used Outlook, or Lync, or Jira, or Confluence, or Salesforce tickets, or whatever their tool of choice is. It just means there's yet another place I have to keep an eye on, yet another inbox to check, yet another app to have slowly eating the battery on my phone and my laptop and taking up precious dock space so Bob in Sales can use an emoji and feel hip and dynamic.

When we first moved to slack I was a bit weary of it. But now its second nature and really works great. Few annoyances, but nothing major. Oh, I *REALLY* wish it had outlook integration, so it knew when people were in meetings and such.

What we really need is a good video chat client for multiple people. Hangouts is horrible, and skype doesn't do well when you have a bunch of people on.

Hangouts might be horrible(?), but it's better than Skype because 1) you can hear more than gibberish if multiple people are talking simultaneously, and 2) the speaker's icon / image moving to the center when they're speaking is useful for keeping people from talking over each other.

We use HipChat at work because Slack was a magnitude of order more expensive, and it's universally hated. The non-tech folks hate its reliance on the cloud and its god-awful native clients, and the tech folks hate its reliance on the cloud and lack of flexibility. We still use IRC for community channels.

> Other Ars staffers, like policy editor Joe Mullin, find that Slack has helped them get a lot more serious about work. Joe never used IRC, partly because there was only one channel where people could talk to each other. Once we had Slack, David Kravets created a #policy channel where Mullin could meet with the other wonk-minded staffers to discuss patent trolls and PACER hacks.

This particularly caught my attention. What exactly prevented Joe from doing that on IRC? Creating a channel is as hard as joining one. What was he missing?

Also, I get that this is a Slack profile, but considering that it touches on how Slack has no competition, can we get some news on FOSS like Mattermost, or Vector.im/Matrix, or Zulip, or Let's Chat?

Joe didn't feel like he had the technical expertise to create one, but that may have been a matter of permissions as well.

That said, you raise an excellent point about FOSS competitors with Slack. What are folks using? Are there any standouts that you think would work well for non-technical teams?

I found it interesting that the one FOIA request that was used as an example said the Emoji were removed. Why? I would consider the Emoji an integral part of the conversation, since they convey with a picture what you would otherwise use a pile of words on.

To go directly from the article's example, the use of a "balls" emoji in a workplace could be considered inappropriate. If someone decided to sue for sexual harassment, and said "they were throwing around these sexually explicit emoji like no one's business," a records search would show no emoji.

To put it another way, it's like going somewhere on vacation, taking a bunch of pictures of the scenery, and a few years later you want to go show a friend your awesome photos, but Facebook has only kept the comments. For a company that puts such heavy emphasis on Emoji, not keeping them as records (or at least not reproducing them for a records search) is bizarre.

The emoji were available for release but the government department did not - they went through and deleted them before releasing.

As a government employee (not USA), this is because emoji are a risk.

In the era of click biat media headlines where a single sentence can be taken out of context to create a 'gotcha!' story, emoji can (and no doubt, have) been headlines when used by government employees. It could be perfectly reasonable emoji to use, but the media can and will write stories about such things. I personally, when using just normal email at work, get a jumpy when someone uses smiley faces. When everyone word you write can and will be used against you, you need to more careful than... showing emotion. Thats just how the game is played.

Slack needs to be able to disable emoji for government, and the fact the owner was dissapointed they were withheld tells me he doesnt understand government.

Reminds me of the Lean blight that was foisted on my employer. All these metrics that turned out to be worse than not having metrics. They can claim all sorts of boosts to productivity. But to say not having meetings means teams are more productive is bunk. I know, it's like talking about Congress. Meetings are detriments to productivity. But that's because meeting leaders are not doing their jobs.

My point about lean can be illustrated by a conversation in one meeting.

Lean drone: "How long does it take to produce a video."

Video producer: "I can't give you a number, because a 30 second video could take a month, while a two-hour video might take a day. In fact, a friend of mine did an ad for Honda that was 30 seconds, and it took him two years to do it." (true story)

Lean drone: "Doesn't matter. Give me a number."

Video producer: "It would be meaningless."

Lean drone: "Doesn't matter, give me an average."

Video producer: "Well, to pull one out of my nether regions, three hours on average?"

Lean drone: "How many videos does a course take?"

Video producer: 10 on average?

Lean drone in report to the company: "By streamlining a process by reducing production time by 50 percent, we have saved the company 500 man hours per video editor per month."

Board Member: "You need to find a new job. Your bogus lean project not only wasted $5 million in two years, it exponentially increased RSI incidents in the lab, and completely ruined employee job satisfaction, without producing a single dollar in benefit. And you're obviously bad at math."

That's what happens when people make up metrics without any basis in reality and without challenging completely outrageous metric claims.

Gah. Can someone please get Newitz an editor? I mean, grammar is a thing. I really want to finish reading this article- the subject matter is interesting/relevant and Newitz seems to have had first-hand access to their offices. But it just takes too much concentration to sift through her many misaligned phrases and misused conjunctions. It's not worth the mental effort.

This will be my last comment on a Newitz article. But please, Ars. I've been a regular reader for 8 + years. I'm begging you.

+1 to this.

It's like we are listening to her talk informally about it, but this is not a verbal conversation, it is written. We don't speak like we write. Interesting topic, needs some serious editing cause it is hard to read as written.

I often write in a stream of consciousness style on casual forum posts, purposely not heavily editing anything once it's written (other than typos), e.g. if I decide, mid-post, to go research something I'm writing about, I'll actually add that action to the post. Of course, I wouldn't write like that on any professional level, but I think it's a good technique to inform the reader not only the writers thoughts on a subject, but also their state of mind. Whether this is valid for an Ars article, well, it probably depends a lot on the reader, and their own state of mind. *I* personally found the piece a bit too rambling and skipped ahead to the comments, but on another day, I may have well found it fascinating.

I don't get the hate. This was a long article which could have been broken up into a series of smaller ones, but it was interesting to see first-hand impressions of the company, the roadmap for future investments (apps, always apps... and appstores, bah), but also some insights into Ars Technica office culture. I enjoyed reading this.

I didn't see either of the comments you quoted, which I also quote above, as "hate", but rather criticism, particularly the second, by schizrade. Perhaps you'd rather argue about the validity or constructiveness of said criticism instead?

For IRC / Linux, you retain ownership and it's more powerful, lightweight, and easier to tinker around in;For Slack / Mac, you "use the clouuuud", and its easier to use and is "prettier", and isn't as open.

Now that I'm all old, pretty is good.

My first and last experience with using IRC was on VM/CMS on some mainframe buried under Penn State.

At the endless urging from a friend of mine, downloaded mIRC a few years back. Still impenetrable for a first-time user. And this is from someone that uses multiple types of command-line interfaces daily.

There are dozens upon dozens of good chat clients, and many more OK ones. I'm glad that I haven't been in the position where I've been forced to use IRC yet.

I personally, when using just normal email at work, get a jumpy when someone uses smiley faces. When everyone word you write can and will be used against you, you need to more careful than... showing emotion. Thats just how the game is played.

Slack needs to be able to disable emoji for government, and the fact the owner was dissapointed they were withheld tells me he doesnt understand government.

It's both scary and amusing how government workers act like characters from "Equilibrium". I agree that emotions generally have negative impacts on good decision making, but its also what makes us human. Restricting communications doesn't make the emotional aspects go away.

I really REALLY dislike Slack, though I don't think it's the fault of the software particularly. It just comes down to lack of adoption and fragmentation, as others have pointed out. Adding Slack to the mix doesn't mean any of my coworkers have stopped used Outlook, or Lync, or Jira, or Confluence, or Salesforce tickets, or whatever their tool of choice is. It just means there's yet another place I have to keep an eye on, yet another inbox to check, yet another app to have slowly eating the battery on my phone and my laptop and taking up precious dock space so Bob in Sales can use an emoji and feel hip and dynamic.

This is part of what I was concerned about when reading the article. The notion of replacing e-mail in most offices; ludicrous. I've not used Slack, but this article convinced me I'd hate it.